Monday, August 11, 2014

Below, a Youtube video of an Islamist rally at the Hague (on July 4) in which the participants chanted "Khaybar, Khaybar Ya Yahud, jaish Muhammad sayaud" - "Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, Mohammed’s army will return.” This refers to a battle in the oasis of Khaybar, in Arabia, between Jews and the followers of Muhammad in 629 C.E., which the Jews lost to the Muslims. They were forced to pay tribute in order to remain in the oasis, but were expelled from it several years later (see the Wikipedia article - Battle of Khaybar).

The demonstrators also chant "Allahu Akbar," "Down, down USA," "Down, down Israel," and "there is no god but God."

Notice also the black and white flags - they all have the shehadah (the Muslim declaration of faith) written on them. I also saw the same flags (only with a white background) at the Zurich anti-Israel rally I attended.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

In a post on the Magnes Zionist blog, Charles Manekin (who goes by the nom de plume Jeremiah [Jerry) Haber], asks the reader to stop demonizing Hamas. I'm not going to engage with his main argument, which I disagree with, and which I'm sure others will seek to demolish. My problem is with a statement he made about the Israeli political party Shas. He writes:

I shudder to think how the Jewish Home party, or better, the Shas party, would fight a war were they to be in control of the Israeli government, and Israel was under Palestinian occupation for generations, and a decade long-siege. Needless to say I detest Hamas’s anti-Semitism, just like I detest the anti-Palestinianism and anti-Arabism of the Jewish fundamentalist right.

Haber seems to be equating the Jewish Home party and Shas with Hamas. If Jews in Palestine were under occupation and siege, then these two parties would act like Hamas and launch rockets against civilian targets, blow up buses, and send suicide bombers to blow up pizza parlors.

I have read this equation before, as applied to Shas - that it's just like Hamas, only without suicide bombers. I think this is a gross slander on the Shas party, its leaders, and the people who vote for it. Historically, the Shas party, like the other ultra-Orthodox parties, has not been the leader of the aggressive Israeli right-wing. Currently it's not even in the government, while Jewish Home, led by Naftali Bennett, is in the government. Therefore Shas has nothing to do with the actions of the current government in Gaza. (The other Jewish ultra-Orthodox parties are also not in the government, nor are the Arab parties).

Ari Shavit, in his book, My Promised Land (chapter 11) recounts the story of Aryeh Deri, the once and current leader of the Shas party. The chapter tells his story from his roots in Morocco, the family's aliyah to Israel, their suffering as new immigrants, Aryeh's mother's sending him to an ultra-Orthodox boarding school, his attendance at the Hebron Yeshiva, his involvement in the founding of the Shas party, his rise to power as leader of the party, and his downfall on corruption charges. Much of the chapter is in Deri's own words. From reading this chapter, it's clear that Shas was founded by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, with the support of Rav Shach (at that time the leader of the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox world), in order to give strength - spiritual and material - to the Sephardi-Mizrachi community in Israel which had lost its way with the immigration to Israel. The slogan of the Shas party is מחזירים עטרה ליושנה - "returning the crown to its glory," meaning returning the spiritual strength to Mizrachi Jews. Aryeh Deri himself was in his earlier days more dovish as regards questions of war and peace - I'm not sure what his own position is now.

The Shas platform can be found on the party's website. The two central goals of the party are "to return the crown to its glory" and "advancement of social justice" (קידום הצדק החברתי). Shas is now a Zionist party and belongs to the World Zionist Organization, and has over the years become a supporter of the settlements in the West Bank - part of the party platform is "to build a Jewish home in a large and strong Jewish state in all areas of the land of Israel." The platform also includes an insistence that Jerusalem will never be the subject of negotiations. In the Israeli political scene, Shas is definitely on the right wing, as concerning issues of war and peace with the Palestinians.

While Shas can now be defined as Zionist, it does not support the conscription of yeshiva students into the Israeli army, and this is the main reason it does not belong to the current government coalition. This is in contrast to the Jewish Home party, which was one of the important supporters of a law to begin conscripting yeshiva students. The Jewish Home party is an updated version of the National Religious Party, and it is much more aggressive in its Jewish nationalism than Shas is. We don't have to imagine how it would behave in the current war with Hamas in Gaza - the leader of the party, Naftali Bennett, has made it clear that he and his party are to the right of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. He opposed the current ceasefire, which went into effect at midnight Israel time today.

One important thing that leading rabbis in the party have recently done is to harshly denounce the killing of Muhammad Abu Khdeir, which was one of the catalysts for the current war. Rav Shalom Cohen, the spiritual leader of Shas, has ruled that the murderers of Abu Khdeir are in the category of "din rodef." From Ynet:

The harshest condemnation came from Rabbi Shalom Cohen, the new spiritual leader of the Sephardic Shas moment. Ynet has learned that Cohen told his associates on this way to a rally in memory of the three Israeli teens murdered by Palestinian terrorists that "those whose hands are stained with clean blood are subject to 'din rodef,' and their punishment from God cannot be described."

The rabbi was referring to the traditional Jewish "law of the pursuer," under which a person who is "pursuing" another to murder him or her must be killed by any bystander after being warned to stop and refusing.

"My heart bleeds at the evil rumor that a Jewish hands killed the soul of an Arab youth for no fault of his own," Rabbi Cohen told his associates. "One's ears will tingle upon hearing about the horrifying act which infuriates the nations and may lead to horrible bloodshed."

As I wrote in an earlier blogpost, one reason for the harsh denunciation of the murderers of Abu Khdeir is that they come from prominent rabbinic families in the Shas movement. Of the three accused killers, only one has been named (because he is the only adult among the three). His name is Yosef Chaim Ben-David, and his father is Rabbi Saadya Ben-David, the leader of a kollel (a yeshiva for married men) and a community in Har Nof, and also a noted educator. Yosef Chaim was the manager of an optical store in the Geula neighborhood in Jerusalem.

As I wrote previously,

The father of three of the suspects, who are brothers, is known as a educator in the Haredi Sephardic community. From the article, “In Shas they explain the severe response of the spiritual leader of the movement, Rav Shalom Cohen – who ruled that the murderers are subject to ‘din rodef’ – with horror that comes from his (the educator’s) renown among the community from which the suspects in the murder come, because this is flesh from the flesh of the movement, and also from its Torah elite. The chief rabbi of Israel, Yitzhak Yosef, also harshly denounced the murder, and even requested to visit the mourning tent of the family of Abu Khdeir (the visit did not occur because of instructions from the Shin Bet).”

When I wrote those words, the court had not yet permitted the publication of the names of the accused, but now we know that the educator in this paragraph is Rav Saadya Ben-David, and that the main suspect is his son Yosef Chaim. I don't know if the other two sons of Rav Ben-David are still suspects, since the other suspects are minors and their names have not been revealed by the court.

What is clear is that the leaders of Shas were horrified by the thought that a son of one of the esteemed rabbis of the movement was a suspect in an especially brutal murder. As Rabbi Cohen said, this horrifying act "may lead to horrible bloodshed" (as it has).

Are these the words of men who would send their followers out as suicide bombers to murder innocent men, women, and children? Would they countenance their followers blowing up buses full of innocent passengers? Clearly not.

The Shas party is not one that I agree with - it is socially very conservative (Rabbi Cohen has also denounced gay people and ruled that women in Shas should not go on to advanced education - in direct contradiction of the rulings of the late leader of Shas, Rav Ovadia Yosef), and I do not agree with their position on settlements and their belief that the entire land of Israel should be under Israeli rule. But the party is led by people who know murder when they see it, even when it is committed by a member of their community, and who denounce it harshly, even when the victim is a Palestinian teenager. Hamas, on the contrary, has sent out suicide bombers, has launched missiles heedlessly at civilian targets, and has never apologized for killing innocent people, much less issued denunciations of murder done by its operatives.

Friday, August 08, 2014

I was just talking to some friends at dinner, and I predicted that sometime soon our local "peace" movement in Ithaca would hold a rally against the "US war against Iraq" to protest the humanitarian aid the US is now giving to the Yezidis and the military aid we're giving to the Kurds to prevent ISIS from conquering Irbil. I haven't yet heard of anything here, but I just saw a notice of just such an idiotic rally in Chicago, from an article on an Anglican website decrying the persecution of Christians in Iraq by ISIS.

Newland F. Smith comments:

I wonder if there was also a rally earlier in the week on behalf of the Christians and Yezidis who are being persecuted by ISIS? According to the website of the 8th Day Center (a Catholic center), they sponsor a peace vigil every Tuesday morning. I didn't find any mention of a vigil specifically on behalf of the religious minorities of Iraq.

The Anti-War Committee - Chicago has protested against Boeing many times. Recently, they demonstrated against Boeing sponsoring the Air and Water Show in Chicago because of Israel's use of F-15s and 16s, and Apache helicopters (made by Boeing), which they claim makes Boeing complicit in the Israeli "genocide" in Gaza. They also participated in the big pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel demonstration in Chicago on July 9, which I wrote about earlier.

In May, they protested against the Ukrainian government, under the slogans, "No New Cold War with Russia, No U.S. Support for Fascist Atrocities in Ukraine." They appear to have entirely bought into the Russian government's propaganda that the Ukrainian government is run by fascists and that the Russian-supported separatists in eastern Ukraine are entirely benign.

In March they held a panel on BDS and an international women's day dinner honoring Rasmieh Yousef Odeh, a Palestinian woman who entered the United States under false pretenses after spending ten years in an Israeli prison (1969-1979) after being convicted of terrorist activity. She was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Palestinian terrorist group, and according to Haaretz, "was convicted of an attack that killed two people at a Jerusalem market in 1969." She was sentenced to life in prison in 1970, but was released ten years later in a prisoner exchange with the PFLP (for more details, see a second Haaretz article). She was arrested in October, 2013, on immigration fraud, for failing to mention her conviction on her immigration application. (Incidentally, Students for Justice in Palestine at Cornell condemned her arrest and called for her immediate release).

The niece of one of the men who was killed in the attack has written an affecting article on the effect of Odeh's act on her grandmother, and asks when those who support her will stop defending her.

On Friday, Feb. 21, 1969, my dad's brother, Edward Joffe, and his best friend, Leon Kanner, went to the supermarket Supersol at the intersection of Agron and Hamelech George in Jerusalem to make some purchases for a botany department excursion.

As they approached the meat counter, an explosive device, a biscuit can filled with five kilograms of dynamite, which had been placed there by Rasmieh Yousef Odeh and Ayesha Oudeh, was suddenly detonated, and Eddie and Leon were both instantly killed.

And so again I ask the supporters of Rasmieh Yousef Odeh: At what point will you stop defending her?

So, honoring a convicted terrorist murderer! Way to Go, Anti-War Committee - Chicago! This dinner was sponsored by a series of other groups, including the American Friends Service Committee. I had thought the Quakers didn't believe in taking up arms, but I guess they make an exception in Odeh's case.

Reading further on the blog for the Anti-War Committee, I found several posts on why the US should not intervene in Syria in order to protect Syrians from the chemical warfare attacks of the Syrian government.

So I guess we cannot expect the so-called "Anti-War Committee - Chicago" and its fellow-travelers (this term was chosen with care) to call for or participate in a demonstration protesting ISIS and its persecution of Christians, Yezidis, Shi'ites, and Sunnis who oppose their theocratic rule. Instead, what we get is a demonstration in Chicago sponsored by a supposed anti-war group and a Catholic center that is actually opposing any effective action to stop ISIS. Objectively, therefore the Anti-War Committee and the 8th Day Center are on the side of ISIS in its persecution of Christians, Yezidis, and others. I am sure they would deny this charge wholeheartedly, but that is what their actions amount to.

The story doesn't end here, however. Before the pathetic pro-war demonstration by the "Anti-War Committee" today, there was another demonstration in Chicago, this one sponsored by the Assyrian American National Federation (Assyrians are Christians), advocating American intervention in Iraq against ISIS. The demonstration had been planned for some time and coincided with the first American airstrikes today against ISIS.

Thousands of Chicago-area Assyrians gathered in the downtown square to demand more military aid and call for U.S. leadership in the international community’s creation of a safe haven in the Nineveh plains for thousands of displaced Christians and minorities.

“We don’t just want airstrikes. We need a plan for the future,” Margaret Khamoo, president of the Chicago Chapter of the Assyrian Aid Society of America, yelled into a megaphone.

The demonstrators marched around Daley Plaza first in silence and then while chanting, holding wooden crosses, Assyrian and American flags and signs that condemned ISIS along with Western nations.

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our Western friends,” read one sign.

“I really feel the suffering,” said Lena Ishkhan, 52, a participant who lives in Glenview but whose parents are from Iraq. “It really reached us to the core. It’s too much. Enough is enough.”

An article on 7 Ways Our Children are Brainwashed claims that "The textbooks our children read are printed by companies who, ultimately, are Zionist owned. What are the chances that a Zionist view would differ from the view of a Palestinian or someone who opposes Zionism?" All the textbook companies are owned by Zionists? The term "Zionism" here is a code word for "Jews."

The article called What if Everything You Were Taught is a Lie, asserts that "If you trace the company’s who print our children’s textbooks, you’ll find a Zionist agenda behind them all. For example, George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, was arrested for funding both sides of World War II, yet we never learned this in school. Why? Because had we learned this, NEITHER Bush would have been elected president for having a traitor in their lineage." Now why on earth would it be a "Zionist" agenda to whitewash Prescott Bush, if he helped fund the Nazis (by the way, I have no idea if this is true or not - and I certainly wouldn't depend on this article to tell me!).

Another article, on How to Deprogram Yourself, makes the same claim about "Zionist" control of the media: "Along with religion, this is one of the biggest mind control venues out there. How many times have you ever felt good after watching the news? If you trace who owns the mainstream media in the United States (TV, newspapers, radio stations, magazines, etc…) you’ll find that there are only 6 people at the top of the chain and all have Zionist ties, so what are the chances that your news is 'fair and unbiased?'" Gregg Prescott, who is the author of this article, has published many similar ones on how the "Zionists" control the world.

Why would you want to post something from a site that promulgates conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and antisemitism? Do not use this site - its stories are completely unreliable.

Wednesday, August 06, 2014

When I arrived in Israel on June 10th what most concerned me was what ISIS was doing in Iraq - the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Da'ash). They had just taken Mosul and seemed like they would soon attack Baghdad. They haven't done that yet, but they have been consolidating their hold on Iraq, including conquering the town of Sinjar, near Iraqi Kurdistan, a couple of days ago. 200,000 people fled, especially Yazidis. Many of them are now stranded on a mountaintop, surrounded by ISIS fighters and are beginning to die of thirst.

BAGHDAD — Stranded on a barren mountaintop, thousands of minority Iraqis are faced with a bleak choice: descend and risk slaughter at the hands of the encircled Sunni extremists or sit tight and risk dying of thirst.

Humanitarian agencies said Tuesday that between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians remain trapped on Mount Sinjar since being driven out of surrounding villages and the town of Sinjar two days earlier. But the mountain that had looked like a refuge is becoming a graveyard for their children.

Unable to dig deep into the rocky mountainside, displaced families said they have buried young and elderly victims of the harsh conditions in shallow graves, their bodies covered with stones. Iraqi government planes attempted to airdrop bottled water to the mountain on Monday night but reached few of those marooned.

“There are children dying on the mountain, on the roads,” said Marzio Babille, the Iraq representative for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). “There is no water, there is no vegetation, they are completely cut off and surrounded by Islamic State. It’s a disaster, a total disaster.”

Most of those who fled Sinjar are from the minority Yazidi sect, which melds parts of ancient Zoroastrianism with Christianity and Islam. They are considered by the al-Qaeda-inspired Islamic State to be devil worshippers and apostates.

Yazidi sources told Al Jazeera that Islamic State fighters have asked the remaining Yazidis under their control to convert to Islam or face death. Islamic State-affiliated social media accounts, meanwhile, have posted images of summary executions of individuals in Sinjar and surrounding areas.

Multiple Yazidi sources told Al Jazeera that Islamic State fighters have taken dozens of women hostage and moved them to the nearby town of Talafar, which has been under the group's control since June. These claims could not be independently verified as journalists cannot enter Islamic State-controlled areas.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs , between 35,000-50,000 Yazidi civilians are stuck atop the Sinjar Mountains, surrounded by Islamic State fighters on all sides. People are rapidly running out of food and water supplies, and the UN Special Representative for Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, warned that " a humanitarian tragedy is unfolding in Sinjar ".

Members of the group trapped in the mountains told Al Jazeera that as many as 30 people have starved to death so far, the majority of whom are children, while some Yazidi men - armed with light weapons - are protecting the routes that Islamic State fighters could use to get to the civilians. These reports could not be independently verified by Al Jazeera.

"We cannot get out of here; we cannot move. It's all [Islamic State] fighters around us. If we move down they will kill us," Qassim Barakat, who is stuck in the mountain with 15 members of his extended family, told Al Jazeera by phone. "We want the world to help us. We want the United Nations to help us."

"We are here without any shelter. Everyone, children and women, are laying down under the sun," said Shakir Hassan, who said he escaped to the mountain from the nearby Gir Aziz district with hundreds of other families. "We call on any power who can to come save us."

Many of the families who fled to the mountain were either those who did not have a car to drive to the safer areas in Peshmergas' hands or mistakenly thought that ISIS would not be able to stay in Sinjar very long.

On Tuesday, Yazidi sources told Al Jazeera that helicopters - thought to belong to the Iraqi military - had dropped food and water to those caught in the Sinjar Mountain. But some of the supplies were rendered useless as they flew at a high altitude to avoid being shot down by Islamic State fighters.

The roads from Shekhan to Zumar, another area that Islamic State fighters captured on Saturday, are full of displaced families camping on both sides of the road without any protective shelter. Others are now living in two camps for internally-displaced persons in Sharia and Khanik....

"Around 85 percent of the Yazidis live in Sinjar," said Mamo Selim al-Bagsri, head of the municipality in Skhean. He warned that large-scale killing of Yazdis would have an irreversible impact on the community's future. "The only one who is not against Yazidis is God."

DOHUK, Iraq: Iraqi helicopters dropped supplies on Tuesday to thousands of people hiding from jihadists in desolate mountains, many of them from the Yazidi minority which officials warned risked being massacred or starved into extinction.

A Yazidi lawmaker broke down in tears during a parliament session as she urged the government and the international community to save her community from Islamic State militants who overran the Sinjar region.

"Over the past 48 hours, 30,000 families have been besieged in the Sinjar mountains, with no water and no food," said Vian Dakhil. "Seventy children have already died of thirst and 30 elderly people have also died," she said.

Dakhil said 500 Yazidi men were killed by IS militants since they took over the town of Sinjar and surrounding villages on Sunday. Their women were enslaved as "war booty", she said. "We are being slaughtered, our entire religion is being wiped off the face of the earth. I am begging you, in the name of humanity."

The United Nations' Children Fund, earlier on Tuesday, said that at least 40 children had died as a result of the IS onslaught on Sinjar, which was previously under the control of Kurdish peshmerga troops.

The town, near the Syrian border, is a hub for Yazidis, a very closed community that follows an ancient faith rooted in Zoroastrianism and referred to by jihadists as "devil worshippers".

Sinjar was also a temporary home for thousands of displaced people from other minorities, such as Shiite Turkmen who had fled the nearby city of Tal Afar when IS launched its offensive on June 9.

The attack on Sinjar sent thousands of people running from their homes in panic, some of them scurrying into the mountains with no supplies. "Families who fled the area are in immediate need of urgent assistance, including up to 25,000 children who are now stranded in mountains surrounding Sinjar and are in dire need of humanitarian aid, including drinking water and sanitation services," Unicef said.

While the world has been concerned with Gaza and Ukraine, ISIS continues to consolidate its hold on Iraq and Syria, killing thousands of people in the process and threatening hundreds of thousands more. The question is not why people are paying attention to Gaza - it is why the vicious terrorist acts of ISIS are being ignored by the world. Are the Christians, Yezidis, and other religious minority groups in Iraq of less importance than the Palestinians of Gaza? Why are there not mass demonstrations in the streets of Europe and America demanding that our governments do something to help defeat ISIS and protect its victims? After all, the US and UK are responsible for destabilizing Iraq - doesn't that require us to take responsibility for helping the people of Iraq endangered by ISIS?

Another blogger at the Times of Israel also advocates crimes against humanity to wipe out the current Amalek, Hamas! His name is Irwin Blank. See http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/1-samuel-1518/. He sees the current conflict in the light of God's command to Saul to wipe out all of the Amalekites (1 Samuel chapter 15).

He writes:

G-d might be meant to illustrate that voice of the people-the vox populi. In this case, G-d had demanded that Saul (or the “prime minister”) enter into battle with the Amalekites (Hamas and its savage partners) and destroy them utterly even if that means to the last child, cow and goat. As cruel as this appears, it is a lesson that teaches a nation in terrible danger that it has a legitimate obligation to put a definite end to a substantial threat. The end of such a conflict must make it impossible for that enemy to rebuild and continue to vex one’s nation forever.

Time and again, throughout Jewish history, we have been told that Amalek will arise in every generation to try to destroy this people. Saul refuses to kill Agag, the king of the Amalekites. In his disobedience, his defying of G-d, is equivalent to our present leadership attempting to fight Hamas while refusing to employ the means to destroy it entirely. By discovering and exploding all the tunnels, or seizing all their arms, is inadequate to assure the utter destruction that is necessary in this war against the Amalekites of today. There must be no quarter given, no “humanitarian ” ceasefires, but a resolute combat without the words and demands of a hateful, hypocritical cabal barking like angry dogs, at our heels. Because, just as the Amalekites fell upon the rear of the Israelites as they passed through their lands on the way to Canaan, the terrorists will violate every ceasefire, every truce and every politically machined halt to the fighting to retreat and bind their wounds waiting for the next opportunity to attack us....

Again, 58 years later, and several bloody campaigns, thousands of rockets launched into Israel, tunnels dug to enable our enemies to kidnap and murder our people, and the myriad attempts of Hamas and its thugs to bring more and greater weapons of death to their arsenals in order to bleed the people of Israel, we find ourselves in battle with 21st century Amalekites because we have failed to listen to the L-rd, we have failed to kill their king, we have failed to, as Samuel lectured Saul, to “utterly destroy” the foe as the L-rd demanded. As the citizens of the State of Israel demand of their “king.”

Does this mean we, on purpose, kill the innocent? No, that is merely an allegory of Biblical times, an example of the cruelty of ancient warfare. But it does mean that we leave nothing that might sustain a weakened and beaten foe. To destroy Hamas utterly, we cannot stop this war until they unconditionally surrender, even if it means making the war more horrific for the people of Gaza, who are the victims of their own leadership. Just as the Amalekites were the victims of their own king, whom Saul left alive and why today, we fight the modern day Amalekites in every generation.

It’s time to take heed of the words of the L-rd, it is time to do what the people of Israel demand, it is time to kill Agag.

Yochanan Gordon, a blogger for the Times of Israel, published a disgusting blogpost earlier today, entitled, "When Genocide is Permissible." The article has been taken down by the editors of the Times of Israel, but Gordon also posted it to his Facebook page and to the website of the Five Towns Jewish Times, and as of now, it's still up on both sites. Update: it's now been taken down by both sites.

It's also been republished in various other venues, and I have screenshots of it. In the article, Gordon argues that "We are at war with an enemy whose charter calls for the annihilation of our people. Nothing, then, can be considered disproportionate when we are fighting for our very right to live." He thinks that the US and the UN have tied Israel's hands in properly prosecuting the war.
He then writes:

Hamas has stated forthrightly that it idealizes death as much as Israel celebrates life. What other way then is there to deal with an enemy of this nature other than obliterate them completely? News anchors such as those from CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera have not missed an opportunity to point out the majority of innocent civilians who have lost their lives as a result of this war.

But anyone who lives with rocket launchers installed or terror tunnels burrowed in or around the vicinity of their home cannot be considered an innocent civilian. If you’ll counter, that Hamas has been seen abusing civilians who have attempted to leave their homes in response to Israeli warnings to leave – well then, your beginning to come to terms with the nature of this enemy which should automatically cause the rules of standard warfare to be suspended.

This part of the argument is the first step to crimes against humanity. Of course the civilians living around the rocket launchers or tunnels are innocent, unless they themselves launch the rockets or build and maintain the tunnels. The women, children, and men not of fighting age in Gaza by definition are not responsible for the rocket launchers or tunnels, as it is adult men who do these things. And by no means all adult men - no one is claiming that all the adult men of Gaza are part of the Hamas fighting force. Anyone who is a civilian is not guilty and should not be intentionally attacked. This is a basic foundation of the contemporary laws of how war should be conducted. It doesn't matter that Hamas won an election - that doesn't make the innocent civilians of Gaza any less innocent.

This is the same principle that declares that it is a war crime for Hamas to fire missiles at Israeli kibbutzim, moshavim, towns, and cities - indiscriminate fire aimed at civilians is a war crime, as the UN human rights commissioner Navi Pillay just said a day or two ago. Israeli civilians voted in the current government - but that does not mean that they should be treated as combatants whom it is legitimate to attack.

Everyone agrees that Israel has the right to defend itself as well as the right to exercise that right.

Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has declared it, Obama and Kerry have clearly stated that no one
could be expected to sit idle as thousands of rockets rain down on the heads of its citizens,
placing them in clear and present danger. It seems then that the only point of contention is
regarding the measure of punishment meted out in this situation.

I will conclude with a question for all the humanitarians out there. Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu clearly stated at the outset of this incursion that his objective is to restore a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel. We have already established that it is the responsibility of every government to ensure the safety and security of its people.

While it is correct that it is a government responsibility to ensure the safety of the people living under its rule, not all means are permissible. Massacring civilians is not permissible. Murdering soldiers who have already surrendered themselves is not permissible. Again, this is not just my opinion - it is part of the laws of war.

If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?

Of course not. Genocide is never permissible. Since the end of the Second World War the international community has agreed that genocide is the ultimate crime.

We - the Jews - experienced genocide in our own flesh. How can a fellow Jew advocate the genocide of the people of Gaza, knowing what we suffered at the hands of the Nazis?

Did Yochanan Gordon learn nothing through his study of Torah? His Facebook page says that he studied at Mesivta Chaim Shlomo. Did he learn nothing there about the mitzvah: "You shall not murder"?

He is one of the sales managers at the Five Towns Jewish Times, in addition to writing opinion pieces for them. His father founded the newspaper, as he writes in his bio for the Times of Israel. Will the newspaper allow his column to remain on their website?

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About Me

I teach at Ithaca College, do research on early Jewish magic and mysticism, visit Israel frequently, and enjoy the lovely Finger Lakes region of New York State. This is my personal blog, and the statements in it reflect only my own views, not those of Ithaca College.